Twilight, Star Bright

Friday before last I was in Brisbane Airport with 4.75 hours to kill, work had booked a non flexible fare which was stupid as we didn’t really know when the training was going to finish and it finished early. So I had to buy a book to help me kill the time, as Jamie Wakefield had posted not entirely terrible comments about Stephanie Meyers Twilight saga I decided to pick up the first book and read it.

I finished it the next evening and decided to pick up the next three on Sunday afternoon. I finished those three by the following Sunday night, which puts this at the quickest I’ve ever read a series of books. Although don’t let the physical size of the books scare you the font used isn’t all that small.

Jamie’s comments about the books made it sound like the first book was only worth reading so you could read the following books. Maybe his comments had coloured my expectations too much but I found the first book to be pretty good and the second and third to be the worst.

I think I have to blame her publishers for my dislike of the second and third books, they were spoilt way too much by the teaser bits at the start and end of each book. I can understand the teaser at the end of a book spoiling the next book a little bit, but these books had so few twists that having one of them spoilt pretty much invalidated the value of the whole next book.

And it wasn’t just the sneak preview/spoiler in the previous book that did the spoiling, the preface of each book gave you way to much information about what was going to happen. If they had just ripped those sections of the books out, I would have enjoyed them much more.

When half way through the 4th book I discovered the best twist in the books a mere 10 pages before it happened I felt a great sense of achievement. Not for my self, but that finally Stephanie Meyer had discovered the skill of how to write a book. Previously, even without reading the spoiler in the previous book, she was telegraphing what was going to happen for at least half the book. That’s not a twist, it’s just bad story writing.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, apparently Jamie is much more of a man than I am: I never found the descriptions of the characters to be either terribly repetitive or overly soppy. It must just be that I like Stephanie’s style.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to rush out and read the first book again from Edwards perspective though. It’ll probably be a more sedate meadering, once it is properly released.

(While I might not bother to pay for copyrighted things always I do respect content creators enough to let them wait for it to be finished before consuming it)

So I do recommend them, assuming you can cope with reading books intended for teens and skip the teaser/preface.

PS: I have no idea what this posts title is meant to mean, it just sounded nice.